Sunday, October 31, 2010

Jörg Bivendørf was born on the island Hopen. At age 79, fed up with the secrecy of his possible parents among the four resident researchers at the weather station, he stole a wagon and set sail for Biarritz. Seventeen months later, barely dry, he drifted up on the shores of Barentsburg and took a cab to Longyearbyen. He found Svalbard an ideal place for fashion inspiration because of the pessimistic temperature readings. For Jörg, more layers equals more Fashion.
Jörg was named for his Swedish grandmother Jörgina VIII, who is credited with coining the term "you wanna make a muffin? When he was born, realizing he was completely naked, Jörg began fashioning garments out of necessity. His first design was the totally organic and original Seal Chaps ™.
Nowadays, Jörg chooses Longmont, Colorado for his collaborations with Beauty due to the friendly and professional service at The Cheese Importers.http://www.cheeseimporters.com

Thursday, March 11, 2010

Nature has no alphabet or written word.
Yet to writers and poets, words exist within the topography
and are there to be found if one searches.
These "lost" words hide beneath the brambles, within the moss,
or float in the air as sounds or songs.
The flora and fauna contribute their lexis throughout the landscape,
with bleached bones, old stones or other refuse,
waiting for an interpreter to turn their words to language.

There used to be this joke about carousels of vacation slides and dry evenings where people were forced to watch them. 150 photos of the Grand Canyon, or the same 18 shots of Disneyland, or found postcards of roadside tourist traps. There have been some attempts to recreate these images through curation and cultural capital as a legitimate and once lost history of the genre. You can see it in websites like Square America, exhibitions like The History of the American Snapshot, or in projects like Martin Parr's collections of boring postcards.
I am interested in how to re-make the spirit of these vernacular forms; not through theory, but by a kind of performance working through of historical memes. In this case, the photos here are a document of my vacation to upstate New York: hotel rooms, highways, museums, and roadside stops. In this capacity, they're at once an attempt to make vacation photos again--to reclaim the boring aspects it away from the aesthetes. I do this with a point and shoot camera, with developing the photos at a 24 hour CVS on the highway across the interstate from a Barnes and Noble and a Stop and Shop.
There is some newness to this procedure, an ease that can only be made via digital cameras, the editing done now on lap tops, the storage being done on USB sticks, but the core of this is to force people to look at my vacation photos, not as a move of aesthetic difference.
Though there is an aesthetic difference here, there is a history of art photography here that cannot be ignored, that there is an element of Shore selling postcards in Texas here; an element of making aesthetic that which was first intended to be documentary. The ambiguity of art practice and documentary practice in photography is something that continues to fascinate me, and this work is intended to process those issues.